The Landlady searches for a room of one’s own

Since July I have been writing a book, or at least attempting to write a book. It all started off rather well and for weeks on end I sat at my kitchen table every afternoon for several hours, creative juices flowing. I was interrupted every day at precisely 4pm by my Spanish lodger, very much a creature of habit, who would come and retrieve a yoghurt from the fridge.

“Is book finish yet?” he would ask hopefully and grammatically incorrectly, every afternoon. I’m sure he thought one could knock a book out in a week. In a month, I managed 30,000 words, which is about 60 of these columns and I imagined – rather foolishly it would seem – that it would be finished by October. Then I met The New Boyfriend and suddenly, sitting at my kitchen table ploughing away at my laptop didn’t seem quite so appealing, when there are much more exciting things to do. The Spanish lodger went back to Spain just after the book ground to a halt, so at least I didn’t have the embarrassment of him questioning me over the completion of my oeuvre.
A few thousand more words were written while on holiday in Portugal but, being as I was on holiday with 11 other people, I felt rather rude to be retiring to a quiet corner to write for a few hours every evening and therefore abandoned my attempts after a few days.

With three weeks off work looming, I decided that drastic measures must be taken to at least write another 30,000 words. My friend S’s house in an isolated rural village in Spain seemed to be an appealing location, but even the lowest cost flights were too expensive to make it a viable proposition. On the telephone to my dear friend Katy last week, I was lamenting my lack of discipline and inability to continue with my work with all the distractions of home. I had forgotten that Katy has a holiday ‘shack’ perched on a desolate cliff-top on the North Norfolk coast. She immediately suggested that I spend a week there and so here I am.

“The weather forecast has promised snow or at least Arctic ice and hail”

It took me five hours to get here for the bargain price of £18.10, including the bus to the coast. The plumbing is from the ‘60s and the décor from the ’70s, with swirly carpet and all, but it is warm and has all the mod cons I need to live, yet is without all the mod cons – internet, phone signal – that I don’t need when trying to concentrate. So I’m sitting here looking like a tramp in a man’s t-shirt with no make-up and no bra. Out of the huge picture window in front of me, I can see the lights of the big ships passing down the ‘motorway’ of the North Sea, even though it’s pitch black. All I can hear is the howling wind and the weather forecast has promised snow or at least Arctic ice and hail for tomorrow. Needless to say, I haven’t written anything yet, apart from this…